Microsoft's newest Garage app, the company's brand for more experimental apps, is Group Transcribe, which lets groups of people capture real-time collective meeting transcriptions using their phones. It's available for free right now on iOS. From a report: "This app uses a multi-device approach to provide real-time, high quality transcription and translation, so users can be more present and productive during in-person meetings and conversations," Microsoft's Lainie Huston said in a blog post. Here's how it works. Everyone who wants to participate in the group transcription needs to download the Group Transcribe app. Then, one person kicks off a transcription, and they can invite others to join by sharing a five-letter conversation code, a QR code, or by joining the group transcription with nearby sharing over Bluetooth. Then, the app will begin transcribing the group's conversation, noting who said what. Group Transcribe can even also auto-translate things people say and show those translations in line as part of the transcription. Transcriptions are saved in the app so you can review or share them after a meeting.

schwit1 shares a report from ZDNet: Cyberattackers have turned to search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to deploy malware payloads to as many victims as possible. According to Sophos, the so-called search engine "deoptimization" method includes both SEO tricks and the abuse of human psychology to push websites that have been compromised up Google's rankings. SEO optimization is used by webmasters to legitimately increase their website's exposure on search engines such as Google or Bing. However, Sophos says that threat actors are now tampering with the content management systems (CMS) of websites to serve financial malware, exploit tools, and ransomware.

In a blog post on Monday, the cybersecurity team said the technique, dubbed "Gootloader," involves deployment of the infection framework for the Gootkit Remote Access Trojan (RAT) which also delivers a variety of other malware payloads. The use of SEO as a technique to deploy Gootkit RAT is not a small operation. The researchers estimate that a network of servers -- 400, if not more -- must be maintained at any given time for success. While it isn't known if a particular exploit is used to compromise these domains in the first place, the researchers say that CMSs running the backend of websites could have been hijacked via malware, stolen credentials, or brute-force attacks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Over the weekend, word emerged that a hacker breached far-right social media website Gab and downloaded 70 gigabytes of data by exploiting a garden-variety security flaw known as an SQL injection. A quick review of Gab's open source code shows that the critical vulnerability -- or at least one very much like it -- was introduced by the company's chief technology officer. The change, which in the parlance of software development is known as a "git commit," was made sometime in February from the account of Fosco Marotto, a former Facebook software engineer who in November became Gab's CTO. On Monday, Gab removed the git commit from its website. Below is an image showing the February software change, as shown from a site that provides saved commit snapshots.

The commit shows a software developer using the name Fosco Marotto introducing precisely the type of rookie mistake that could lead to the kind of breach reported this weekend. Specifically, line 23 strips the code of "reject" and "filter," which are API functions that implement a programming idiom that protects against SQL injection attacks. This idiom allows programmers to compose an SQL query in a safe way that "sanitizes" the inputs that website visitors enter into search boxes and other web fields to ensure that any malicious commands are stripped out before the text is passed to backend servers. In their place, the developer added a call to the Rails function that contains the "find_by_sql" method, which accepts unsanitized inputs directly in a query string. Rails is a widely used website development toolkit.

"Sadly Rails documentation doesn't warn you about this pitfall, but if you know anything at all about using SQL databases in web applications, you'd have heard of SQL injection, and it's not hard to come across warnings that find_by_sql method is not safe," Dmitry Borodaenko, a former production engineer at Facebook who brought the commit to my attention wrote in an email. "It is not 100% confirmed that this is the vulnerability that was used in the Gab data breach, but it definitely could have been, and this code change is reverted in the most recent commit that was present in their GitLab repository before they took it offline." Ironically, Fosco in 2012 warned fellow programmers to use parameterized queries to prevent SQL injection vulnerabilities.

The market for virtual and augmented reality products has developed slower than expected, but Microsoft is seeking to accelerate the sector by making it much easier for people to connect from different locations and with different kinds of devices. From a report: The ultimate goal of the new effort, dubbed Microsoft Mesh, is to allow, for example, a person in an office in New York using Facebook's Oculus VR headset to collaborate with a person in Seattle using Microsoft's HoloLens 2 glasses. Using Mesh-compatible hardware and software, the two people would be able to see virtual representations of each other appearing in their offices, talking and moving in real time as if they were present. And both would be able to see a common view of virtual charts or digital objects projected before them that they could change or manipulate. At least that's the vision that Microsoft demonstrated for the first time in public at its Ignite conference on Tuesday. Ultimately, Mesh could be used to connect users on a variety of VR gadgets, PC and Mac computers, and smartphones.

But getting all the various hardware makers to agree to use Microsoft's standards may not be as easy as the company hopes. And while Microsoft's HoloLens and popular collaboration software like Teams and Office will be compatible with Mesh, other software developers also may be wary of depending on the company for such critical functionality. "This has been the dream for mixed reality, the idea from the very beginning," Alex Kipman, a Microsoft technical fellow working on the project, explained at the demonstration. "You can actually feel like you're in the same place with someone sharing content or you can teleport from different mixed reality devices and be present with people even when you're not physically together."

For years, tech companies have touted blockchain technology as a means to develop identity systems that are secure and decentralized. The goal is to build a platform that could store information about official data without holding the actual documents or details themselves. Instead of just storing a scan of your birth certificate, for example, a decentralized ID platform might store a validated token that confirms the information in it. Then when you get carded at a bar or need proof of citizenship, you could share those pre-verified credentials instead of the actual document or data. Microsoft has been one of the leaders of this pack -- and is now detailing tangible progress toward its vision of a decentralized digital ID. From a report: At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft announced that it will launch a public preview of its "Azure Active Directory verifiable credentials" this spring. Think of the platform as a digital wallet like Apple Pay or Google Pay, but for identifiers rather than credit cards. Microsoft is starting with things like university transcripts, diplomas, and professional credentials, letting you add them to its Microsoft Authenticator app along with two-factor codes. It's already testing the platform at Keio University in Tokyo, with the government of Flanders in Belgium, and with the United Kingdom's National Health Service. "If you have a decentralized identifier I can verify, say, where you went to school and I don't need you to send me all of the information," says Joy Chik, corporate vice president for Microsoft's cloud and enterprise identity division. "All I need is to get that digital credential and because it's already been verified I can trust it."

Microsoft will release a software development kit in the coming weeks that organizations can use to start building applications that issue and request credentials. And long-term the company says it hopes the system could be used around the world for everything from renting an apartment to establishing identity for refugees who are struggling without documents -- a dream of virtually all decentralized identification efforts. In the NHS pilot, for example, healthcare providers can request access to professional certifications from existing NHS health care workers, who can in turn choose to allow that access, streamlining a process for transferring to another facility that previously required a much more involved back and forth. Under Microsoft's set-up, you can also revoke access to your credentials if the recipient no longer needs access.

Cal Newport, writing for New Yorker: A study, published in 2019, looked at long-term trends in the health of a group of nearly five thousand Swedish workers. They found that repeated exposure to "high information and communication technology demands" (translation: a need to be constantly connected) were associated with "suboptimal" health outcomes. This trend persisted even after they adjusted the statistics for potential complicating factors such as age, sex, socioeconomic status, health behavior, body-mass index, job strain, and social support. Of course, we don't really need data to capture something that so many of us feel intuitively. I recently surveyed the readers of my blog about e-mail. "It's slow and very frustrating. . . . I often feel like email is impersonal and a waste of time," one respondent said. "I'm frazzled -- just keeping up," another admitted. Some went further. "I feel an almost uncontrollable need to stop what I'm doing to check email," one person reported. "It makes me very depressed, anxious and frustrated."

When employees are miserable, they perform worse. They're also more likely, as the French labor minister warned, to burn out, leading to increased health-care costs and expensive employee turnover. A Harvard Business School professor found that giving a group of management consultants predictable time off from e-mail increased the percentage of them who planned to stay at the firm "for the long term" from forty per cent to fifty-eight per cent. E-mail's power to makes us unhappy also has more philosophical implications. There are two hundred and thirty million knowledge workers in the world, which includes, according to the Federal Reserve, more than a third of the U.S. workforce. If this massive population is being made miserable by a slavish devotion to in-boxes and chat channels, then this adds up to a whole lot of global miserableness! From a utilitarian perspective, this level of suffering cannot be ignored -- especially if there is something that we might be able to do to alleviate it. Given these stakes, it's all the more surprising that we spend so little time trying to understand the source of this discontent. Many in the business community tend to dismiss the psychological toll from e-mail as an incidental side effect caused by bad in-box habits or a weak constitution. I've come to believe, however, that much deeper forces are at play in generating our mismatch with this tool, including some that get at the very core of what drives us as humans.

The far-right social media platform Gab says a trove of its contents has been stolen in a security breach -- including passwords and private communications. Wired reports: On Sunday night the WikiLeaks-style group Distributed Denial of Secrets is revealing what it calls GabLeaks, a collection of more than 70 gigabytes of Gab data representing more than 40 million posts. DDoSecrets says a hacktivist who self-identifies as "JaXpArO and My Little Anonymous Revival Project" siphoned that data out of Gab's backend databases in an effort to expose the platform's largely right-wing users. Those Gab patrons, whose numbers have swelled after Parler went offline, include large numbers of Qanon conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and promoters of former president Donald Trump's election-stealing conspiracies that resulted in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill.

DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best says that the hacked data includes not only all of Gab's public posts and profiles -- with the exception of any photos or videos uploaded to the site -- but also private group and private individual account posts and messages, as well as user passwords and group passwords. "It contains pretty much everything on Gab, including user data and private posts, everything someone needs to run a nearly complete analysis on Gab users and content," Best wrote in a text message interview with WIRED. "It's another gold mine of research for people looking at militias, neo-Nazis, the far right, QAnon, and everything surrounding January 6." DDoSecrets says it's not publicly releasing the data due to its sensitivity and the vast amounts of private information it contains. Instead the group says it will selectively share it with journalists, social scientists, and researchers.

According to DDoSecrets' Best, the hacker says that they pulled out Gab's data via a SQL injection vulnerability in the siteâ"a common web bug in which a text field on a site doesn't differentiate between a user's input and commands in the site's code, allowing a hacker to reach in and meddle with its backend SQL database. Despite the hacker's reference to an "Anonymous Revival Project," they're not associated with the loose hacker collective Anonymous, they told Best, but do "want to represent the nameless struggling masses against capitalists and fascists." The company's CEO, Andrew Torba, responded in a public statement on the company's blog that "reporters, who write for a publication that has written many hit pieces on Gab in the past, are in direct contact with the hacker and are essentially assisting the hacker in his efforts to smear our business and hurt you, our users."

AmiMoJo shares a report: Last month, the Linux Mint team published a post on the organization's official blog about the importance of installing security updates on machines running the Linux distribution. The essence of the post was that a sizeable number of Linux Mint devices was running outdated applications, packages or even an outdated version of the operating system itself. A sizeable number of devices run on Linux Mint 17.x, according to the blog post, a version of Linux Mint that reached end of support in April 2019. A new blog post, published yesterday, provides information on how the team plans to reduce the update reluctance of Linux Mint users. Next to showing reminders to users, Linux Mint's Update Manager may enforce some of the updates according to the blog post.

"In some cases the Update Manager will be able to remind you to apply updates. In a few of them it might even insist." Upcoming versions will provide information on the implementation, how the "insisting" part may look like, and whether the installation of updates will be enforced. All of this boils down to a single question: how far should operating system developers go when it comes to updates? BetaNews adds: "And now, it seems the Linux Mint developers are taking a page out of Microsoft's playbook by planning to force some updates on its users. Yes, folks, Linux Mint is becoming more like Windows 10."

Catalin Cimpanu, reporting for The Record: A fully weaponized exploit for the Spectre CPU vulnerability was uploaded on the malware-scanning website VirusTotal last month, marking the first time a working exploit capable of doing actual damage has entered the public domain. The exploit was discovered by French security researcher Julien Voisin. It targets Spectre, a major vulnerability that was disclosed in January 2018. [...] The vulnerability, which won a Pwnie Award in 2018 for one of the best security bug discoveries of the year, was considered a milestone moment in the evolution and history of the modern CPU. Its discovery, along with the Meltdown bug, effectively forced CPU vendors to rethink their approach to designing processors, making it clear that they cannot focus on performance alone, to the detriment of data security. Software patches were released at the time, but the Meltdown and Spectre disclosures forced Intel to rethink its entire approach to CPU designs going forward.

At the time, the teams behind the Meltdown and Spectre bugs published their work in the form of research papers and some trivial proof-of-concept code to prove their attacks. Shortly after the Meltdown and Spectre publications, experts at AV-TEST, Fortinet, and Minerva Labs spotted a spike in VirusTotal uploads for both CPU bugs. While initially there was a fear that malware authors might be experimenting with the two bugs as a way to steal data from targeted systems, the exploits were classified as harmless variations of the public PoC code published by the Meltdown and Spectre researchers and no evidence was found of in-the-wild attacks. But today, Voisin said he discovered new Spectre exploits -- one for Windows and one for Linux -- different from the ones before. In particular, Voisin said he found a Linux Spectre exploit capable of dumping the contents of /etc/shadow, a Linux file that stores details on OS user accounts.

Early last summer, Chinese and Indian troops clashed in a surprise border battle in the remote Galwan Valley, bashing each other to death with rocks and clubs. Four months later and more than 1,500 miles away in Mumbai, India, trains shut down and the stock market closed as the power went out in a city of 20 million people. Hospitals had to switch to emergency generators to keep ventilators running amid a coronavirus outbreak that was among India's worst. The New York Times: Now, a new study lends weight to the idea that those two events may well have been connected -- as part of a broad Chinese cybercampaign against India's power grid, timed to send a message that if India pressed its claims too hard, the lights could go out across the country. The study shows that as the standoff continued in the Himalayas, taking at least two dozen lives, Chinese malware was flowing into the control systems that manage electric supply across India, along with a high-voltage transmission substation and a coal-fired power plant.

The flow of malware was pieced together by Recorded Future, a Somerville, Mass., company that studies the use of the internet by state actors. It found that most of the malware was never activated. And because Recorded Future could not get inside India's power systems, it could not examine the details of the code itself, which was placed in strategic power-distribution systems across the country. While it has notified Indian authorities, so far they are not reporting what they have found. Stuart Solomon, Recorded Future's chief operating officer, said that the Chinese state-sponsored group, which the firm named Red Echo, "has been seen to systematically utilize advanced cyberintrusion techniques to quietly gain a foothold in nearly a dozen critical nodes across the Indian power generation and transmission infrastructure." The discovery raises the question about whether an outage that struck on Oct. 13 in Mumbai, one of the country's busiest business hubs, was meant as a message from Beijing about what might happen if India pushed its border claims too vigorously.

The number of malware strains coded in the Go programming language has seen a sharp increase of around 2,000% over the last few years, since 2017, cybersecurity firm Intezer said in a report published recently. From a report: The company's findings highlight and confirm a general trend in the malware ecosystem, where malware authors have slowly moved away from C and C++ to Go, a programming language developed and launched by Google in 2007. While the first Go-based malware was detected in 2012, it took, however, a few years for Golang to catch on with the malware scene. "Before 2019, spotting malware written in Go was more a rare occurrence and during 2019 it became a daily occurrence," Intezer said in its report. But in the new report, Golang (as it's often also referred to instead of Go) has broken through and has been widely adopted. It is used by nation-state hacking groups (also known as APTs), cybercrime operators, and even security teams alike, who often used it to create penetration-testing toolkits.

chicksdaddy writes: The Security Ledger reports that a flaw in Zoom's Keybase secure chat application left copies of images contained in secure communications on Keybase users' computers after they were supposedly deleted, according to researchers from the security research group Sakura Samurai.

The flaw in the encrypted messaging application, CVE-2021-23827 does not expose Keybase users to remote compromise. However, it could put their security, privacy and safety at risk, especially for users living under authoritarian regimes in which apps like Keybase and Signal are increasingly relied on as a way to conduct conversations out of earshot of law enforcement or security services. It comes as millions of users have flocked to apps like Keybase, Signal and Telegram in recent months.

Sakura Samurai researchers Aubrey Cottle, Robert Willis, and Jackson Henry discovered an unencrypted directory, /Cache, associated with the Keybase client that contained a comprehensive record of images from encrypted chat sessions. The application used a custom extension to name the files, but they were easily viewable directly or simply by changing the custom file extension to the PNG image format, researcher John Jackson told Security Ledger.

In a statement, a Zoom spokesman said that the company appreciates the work of the researchers and takes privacy and security "very seriously."

"We addressed the issue identified by the Sakura Samurai researchers on our Keybase platform in version 5.6.0 for Windows and macOS and version 5.6.1 for Linux. Users can help keep themselves secure by applying current updates or downloading the latest Keybase software with all current security updates," the spokesman said.

In most cases, the failure to remove files from cache after they were deleted would count as a "low priority" security flaw. However, in the context of an end-to-end encrypted communications application like Keybase, the failure takes on added weight, Jackson wrote.

Slashdot reader b-dayyy writes: CrowdSec is a massively multiplayer firewall designed to protect Linux servers, services, containers, or virtual machines exposed on the Internet with a server-side agent. It was inspired by Fail2Ban and aims to be a modernized, collaborative version of that intrusion-prevention tool.

CrowdSec is free and open-source (under an MIT License), with the source code available on GitHub. It uses a behavior analysis system to qualify whether someone is trying to hack you, based on your logs. If your agent detects such aggression, the offending IP is then dealt with and sent for curation. If this signal passes the curation process, the IP is then redistributed to all users sharing a similar technological profile to 'immunize' them against this IP.

The goal is to leverage the power of the crowd to create a real-time IP reputation database. As for the IP that aggressed your machine, you can choose to remedy the threat in any manner you feel appropriate. Ultimately, CrowdSec leverages the power of the community to create an extremely accurate IP reputation system that benefits all its users.

It was clear to the founders that Open Source was going to be one of the main pillars of CrowdSec. The project's founders have been working on open-source projects for decades — they didn't just jump on the train. Rather, they are strong Open Source believers. They believe that the crowd is key to the mass hacking plague we are experiencing, and that Open Source is the best lever to create a community and have people contribute their knowledge to the project, ultimately make it better and more secure.

The solution recently turned 1.x, introducing a major architectural change: the introduction of a local REST API.

Brave Browser had a privacy issue that leaked the Tor onion URL addresses you visited to your locally configured DNS server, "exposing the dark web websites you visit...", writes Bleeping Computer.

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes their report: To access Tor onion URLs, Brave added a "Private Window with Tor" mode that acts as a proxy to the Tor network. When you attempt to connect to an onion URL, your request is proxied through volunteer-run Tor nodes who make the request for you and send back the returned HTML. Due to this proxy implementation, Brave's Tor mode does not directly provide the same level of privacy as using the Tor Browser.

When using Brave's Tor mode, it should forward all requests to the Tor proxies and not send any information to any non-Tor Internet devices to increase privacy. However, a bug in Brave's "Private window with Tor" mode is causing the onion URL for any Tor address you visit to also be sent as a standard DNS query to your machine's configured DNS server. This bug was first reported in a Reddit post and later confirmed by James Kettle, the Director of Research at PortSwigger. BleepingComputer has also verified the claims by using Wireshark to view DNS traffic while using Brave's Tor mode.
Brave has since released an update which fixes the bug.

"Current and former top executives at SolarWinds are blaming a company intern for a critical lapse in password security that apparently went undiagnosed for years," reports CNN. The password in question, "solarwinds123," was discovered in 2019 on the public internet by an independent security researcher who warned the company that the leak had exposed a SolarWinds file server...

It is still unclear what role, if any, the leaked password may have played in enabling suspected Russian hackers to spy on multiple federal agencies and businesses in one of the most serious security breaches in U.S. history. Stolen credentials are one of three possible avenues of attack SolarWinds is investigating as it tries to uncover how it was first compromised by the hackers, who went on to hide malicious code in software updates that SolarWinds then pushed to some 18,000 customers, including numerous federal agencies. Other theories SolarWinds is exploring, said SolarWinds CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna, include the brute-force guessing of company passwords, as well as the possibility the hackers could have entered via compromised third-party software.

Confronted by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, former SolarWinds CEO Kevin Thompson said the password issue was "a mistake that an intern made... They violated our password policies and they posted that password on an internal, on their own private Github account," Thompson said. "As soon as it was identified and brought to the attention of my security team, they took that down...."

Ramakrishna later testified that the password had been in use as early as 2017... That timeframe is considerably longer than what had been reported.
The remarks were made at a hearing of a House security committee, where Representative Katie Porter also strongly criticized the company. "I've got a stronger password than 'solarwinds123' to stop my kids from watching too much YouTube on their iPad! You and your company were supposed to be preventing the Russians from reading Defense Department emails!"

CNN also reports that Microsoft (which is leading the forensic investigation into the breach) "later said there is no evidence that the Pentagon was actually affected by the Russian spying campaign."

ZDNet reports: Scientists from quantum computing company D-Wave have demonstrated that, using a method called quantum annealing, they could simulate some materials up to three million times faster than it would take with corresponding classical methods.

Together with researchers from Google, the scientists set out to measure the speed of simulation in one of D-Wave's quantum annealing processors, and found that performance increased with both simulation size and problem difficulty, to reach a million-fold speedup over what could be achieved with a classical CPU... The calculation that D-Wave and Google's teams tackled is a real-world problem; in fact, it has already been resolved by the 2016 winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Vadim Berezinskii, J. Michael Kosterlitz and David Thouless, who studied the behavior of so-called "exotic magnetism", which occurs in quantum magnetic systems....

Instead of proving quantum supremacy, which happens when a quantum computer runs a calculation that is impossible to resolve with classical means, D-Wave's latest research demonstrates that the company's quantum annealing processors can lead to a computational performance advantage... "What we see is a huge benefit in absolute terms," said Andrew King, director of performance research at D-Wave. "This simulation is a real problem that scientists have already attacked using the algorithms we compared against, marking a significant milestone and an important foundation for future development. This wouldn't have been possible today without D-Wave's lower noise processor."

Equally as significant as the performance milestone, said D-Wave's team, is the fact that the quantum annealing processors were used to run a practical application, instead of a proof-of-concept or an engineered, synthetic problem with little real-world relevance. Until now, quantum methods have mostly been leveraged to prove that the technology has the potential to solve practical problems, and is yet to make tangible marks in the real world.
Looking ahead to the future, long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 asks, "Is this is bad news for encryption that depends on brute-force calculations being prohibitively difficult?"

Jamaica's JamCOVID app and website were taken offline late on Thursday following a third security lapse, which exposed quarantine orders on more than half a million travelers to the island. From a report: JamCOVID was set up last year to help the government process travelers arriving on the island. Quarantine orders are issued by the Jamaican Ministry of Health and instruct travelers to stay in their accommodation for two weeks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. These orders contain the traveler's name and the address of where they are ordered to stay. But a security researcher told TechCrunch that the quarantine orders were publicly accessible from the JamCOVID website but were not protected with a password. Although the files were accessible from anyone's web browser, the researcher asked not to be named for fear of legal repercussions from the Jamaican government.

More than 500,000 quarantine orders were exposed, some dating back to March 2020. TechCrunch shared these details with the Jamaica Gleaner, which was first to report on the security lapse after the news outlet verified the data spillage with local cybersecurity experts. Amber Group, which was contracted to build and maintain the JamCOVID coronavirus dashboard and immigration service, pulled the service offline a short time after TechCrunch and the Jamaica Gleaner contacted the company on Thursday evening. JamCOVID's website was replaced with a holding page that said the site was "under maintenance." At the time of publication, the site had returned.

iRobot, maker of the robotic Roomba vacuums, has confirmed that a software update has been causing issues for some users of its i7 and s9 robots and that it's working on another one to prevent future issues. The catch? It might be a bit before things get sorted out, with iRobot expecting the update to roll out "over the next several weeks." From a report: According to users on Reddit and Twitter, the recent 3.12.8 firmware update has been causing navigation issues. One user described their robot cleaner as acting "drunk" after the update: spinning itself around and bumping into furniture, cleaning in strange patterns, getting stuck in an empty area, and not being able to make it home to the dock. What's more, some other users are reporting that the environment maps their Roombas made were wiped out by the update.

CD Projekt SA said Wednesday it will delay a promised update to the much-criticized role-playing game Cyberpunk 2077, pinning the blame for its slow progress on a recent security breach. From a report: What the Polish publisher didn't say is that most of its employees have been locked out of their workstations for the past two weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. The work stoppage is the result of a ransomware attack disclosed on Feb. 9. The extent of the disruption, which hasn't been previously reported, poses a major setback to CD Projekt's attempt to rescue a game in desperate need of repairs. CD Projekt has said it refused to pay a ransom to the hackers. As a result, employees remain unable to log onto the company's virtual private network, making it impossible to access the systems and tools needed to do most of their jobs, said the people, requesting anonymity because they weren't authorized to talk publicly. Although some CD Projekt employees are working from the headquarters in Warsaw, the majority are at home due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Worried about the security of Linux and open-source code, Google is sponsoring a pair of full-time developers to work on the kernel's security. From a report: The internet giant builds code from its own repositories rather than downloading outside binaries, though given the pace at which code is being added to Linux, this task is non-trivial. Google's open-source security team lead Dan Lorenc spoke to The Register about its approach, and why it will not use pre-built binaries despite their convenience. But first: the two individuals full-time sponsored by Google are Gustavo Silva, whose work includes eliminating some classes of buffer overflow risks and on kernel self-protection, and Nathan Chancellor, who fixes bugs in the Clang/LLVM compilers and improves compiler warnings. Both are already working at the Linux Foundation, so what is new?

"Gustavo's been working on the Linux kernel at the Linux Foundation for several years now," Lorenc tells us. "We've actually been sponsoring it within the Foundation for a number of years. The main change is that we're trying to talk about it more, to encourage other companies to participate. It's a model that works, we're trying to expand it, find contributors that want to turn this into a full-time thing, and giving them the funding to do that." It is in the nature of open source that Google's funding benefits other Linux users, and it is also in the company's interests. How important is Linux to Google? "It's absolutely critical. Google started on Linux. We use it everywhere," says Lorenc. That being the case, why can Google only manage "Gold" membership of the Linux Foundation ($100,000 per annum), whereas others including Microsoft, Intel, Facebook, and Red Hat are "Platinum", which contributes $500,000 annually? "I'm not sure about that stuff. There are dozens of sub-foundations which we are also members of," he adds. Google is ahead of AWS, which is a mere "Silver" member ($20,000 a year).